You're going to need to describe the format of your "symbol table" file in more detail. Is it text? Are the "rows" terminated by line breaks (\n)? How are the columns separated? Fixed width? Commas? Semicolons? Tabs?
–
bendinJan 27 '09 at 6:05

It is needlessy complex - If you're doing something simple, you don't have to create a new dialect, just pass the params: csv.reader(file_obj, delimiter='|', skipinitialspace=True).
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noskloJan 27 '09 at 10:29

The following code will parse it and print the first and last columns of each row:

# open file to read
f = file('db.txt', 'r')
# iterate over the lines in the file
for line in f:
# split the line into a list of column values
columns = line.split(',')
# clean any whitespace off the items
columns = [col.strip() for col in columns]
# ensure the column has at least one value before printing
if columns:
print "first", columns[0] # print the first column
print "last", columns[-1] # print the last column